


that solo's awful long (but it's a good refrain)

by jewishfitz



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Western, Angst, F/M, M/M, Missing Scene, Post-Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-28
Updated: 2019-11-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:48:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21596395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jewishfitz/pseuds/jewishfitz
Summary: a place to put things that are too short to be their own fic. most originally posted to my tumblr. ship + a brief description will be in the chapter title.
Relationships: Kravitz/Taako (The Adventure Zone), Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons
Comments: 5
Kudos: 6





	1. fitzsimmons + butch cassidy and the sundance kid au

**Author's Note:**

> whoops! I haven't posted to ao3 in over a year. I hope I remember how tags work? title is from _On The Radio_ by Regina Spektor.

It’s a good night. One of the best, really. Out on the porch at May’s saloon, the whole of the heavens presented brightly before them like a stack of jewels. They might as well be a pair of kings. **  
**

And Simmons feels like a king. Maybe better, she thinks. All that power and respect, but freedom too.

Daisy is chatting with the new bartender, Trip or something, and she can hear her loud laugh over the din of patrons and piano music.

And Fitz, with his feet up on the railing, is next to her. And maybe it’s her slightly inebriated state, but she thinks that’s where she likes him best.

He catches her staring and grins over his mug. “Penny for your thoughts.”

She shrugs, smiling, and looks back out over the town below. “Just planning.”

“Scheming,” he corrects.

She looks back at him and tilts her head in recognition. “Scheming.”

There’s a comfortable pause. He continues. “So, what are you scheming about?”

She feels a sliver of apprehension in her, but dismisses it. She has long since outgrown fear. This land did that to people. “Us.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Schemes about us?”

She takes a shaky breath. “I was planning for my future today, since we got paid.” He grins at that, she knew he would. “And I was thinking about things. ‘Oh, Fitz would like this.’ ‘Let’s go here together.’ ‘Let’s travel on this train.’ ‘Let’s size up this bank.’ And I realized that without knowing, I’d started making plans for the both of us.” She gets quiet now. “I’ve never done that before, made plans for two.”

He’s looking at the town, not meeting her eyes, and when he speaks again it’s more timid than he’s been in years. “And you want to make those plans? Together?”

She nods, forceful and earnest. “I do. I… I can’t imagine my life without you, Fitz. It’s us or nothing.”

He smiles at her, brighter than the stars and the jewels and the bars of gold she has hidden under the floorboards inside. “Us or nothing.” He pauses. “Do you want to know a secret?”

Now she knows he’s had a few too many, because while they’re close as business acquaintances can be, neither has ever been the sharing type. She knows Fitz better than anyone, anything. She knows how he takes his coffee and his eggs, how he’s secretly named every horse he’s ever stolen, his fake tells and his real ones, and how he squints just a little before he pulls the trigger. But she couldn’t say where he came from if she had a gun to her head (and she has, too many times for comfort).

But he continues. “My real name… it’s Leopold.”

She bursts out laughing, her hand flying to her mouth in a vain attempt to dampen the noise. She sees Daisy look up out of the corner of her eye and grin at them.

Fitz is frowning. “Don’t be mean. It’s unbecoming.”

She can’t stop. “But it’s funny!” He looks down, and she course corrects. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s just-” She whistles, long and low. “Leopold.”

He shrugs, suddenly bashful. “We can’t make plans together if you don’t know my real name.” He nudges her with his foot. “I told you mine, now what’s yours?”

She pauses, and considers. She could easily tell him a lie. But this is Fitz, and the openness and eagerness he shows only to her is something that has shifted her world on its axis. “Jemma,” she says. “My name is Jemma.”

“Jemma.” He says it slowly, savoring each syllable like it’s something precious, the kind of precious they only saw in bank vaults. “Jemma.” He smile. “I like that. Jemma.”

She nudges him back. “Don’t wear it out.”

He shakes his head. “I could never.”


	2. taakitz + canon compliant missing scene

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> baby's first taz balance fic

“What do you miss most about being alive?”

He tosses the question out like it’s nothing, over a cutting board piled high with greens. Kravitz stills for a moment, wine glass resting in his hand, because no one has ever asked him that before.

He’s silent for a long time, so long that Taako stops cooking and stares at him. He doesn’t walk back on the question. He waits patiently.

Kravitz looks around him, suddenly wondering how he ended up here, sitting at a kitchen counter in secret base on a second date. And he looks down at his wineglass and smells the food in the oven and suddenly the answer to the question forms on his lips.

“I miss meaning. Nothing really… means anything. Anymore.”

Taako raises an eyebrow, and suddenly Kravitz can’t meet his eyes.

“Not in a strictly nihilistic way. I’m not saying that actions don’t have consequences, that the things we do don’t matter, it’s just-“ He looks around the kitchen like the answer is hidden in a drawer somewhere. He grabs an apple out of the basket sitting on the counter, and holds it up. “For instance, see this apple?”

Taako is getting more incredulous by the second. “… yes?”

Kravitz has it, and now that he does he barrels forwards. “For the living, for you, this apple is more than an apple. It’s sustenance. It means food, nourishment. Freedom from hunger, from starvation even.” He gestures back to himself. “To me it’s just an apple. I eat it. It means nothing. I’m already dead.” Now that he’s started he can’t stop. “And water? Water doesn’t stand for life for me in the same way it does for you. A desert and a lake have the same effect, which is to say none at all. And rest, rest can hardly have the same connotations of relief when you have eternity before you and behind you.”

He blinks, and Taako is looking at him in some vaguely concerned way, but there’s a flicker of recognition there.

“Sorry,” Kravitz says, looking back down at his wine. “I got carried away.”

Taako shrugs, and goes back to chopping the greens. Kravitz hadn’t realized that he had stopped. “No sweat.”

They’re silent for a moment, before Taako pauses and gestures at him with the knife in as non threatening a way as he can, given the circumstances. “So, by your logic, does this awesome dinner I’m cooking up not mean anything? Because if so, I’d like to stop now before I put too much effort in.”

Kravitz is already shaking his head, fervently. “This dinner means something.” He smiles at Taako. “It means something because you’re making it. And I know what it means to you.”

Taako smiles back. “See! Theory disproven.” He puts down the knife and gently takes Kravitz’s hand where it rests on the countertop. “Things mean things. Maybe not all of them, but the things that matter.” The earnest sincerity in his voice catches Kravitz by surprise, and it’s gone before he can fully register it.

Taako shrugs. “Besides, fuck those apple. The produce on the moon sucks.”

Kravitz laughs.


	3. fitzsimmons + post-s5 missing scene

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> scenes from a funeral pyre. content warning for canon mcd (you know the one)

Contrary to what everyone else thinks is proper, she decides to burn the body.

It took her weeks to build up enough courage to enter the lab-turned-morgue and make preparations, but once she had completed her duty she couldn’t get rid of him quickly enough. So she stands in a field outside some nameless suburban town, with her friends but separate from them, watching flames and sparks streak through the night sky.

Everyone is either watching the fire or watching her and it’s too much, it’s just too much. If she had it her way she would have been the only one out here tonight. The only witness. But who is she to deny others their grief for a few more seconds to lick her wounds?

She watches the fire intently. She had point blank refused to put him in the ground somewhere. What would she do? Buy a plot of land, big enough so it had room for her too some day? Engrave a headstone? Call his mother? May and Mack had begged her for weeks to, at the bear minimum, just make that one phone call. She had refused. The grave, the headstone, the call. All these things were too resolute, too permanent. He would be back. What was the point in unnecessary pageantry? Unnecessary heartache?

Her eyes start to burn from the smoke and the light, so she tilts her head upwards towards the sparks and the stars. No energy created, none destroyed. Except, hadn’t they broken that one immutable rule? Fitz is out there, somewhere, but he’s also here, in front of her, his energy slowly being transformed into heat and sound and ash. Energy never dies. But it still hurts, all the same.

She closes her eyes, flames dancing against her eyelids. The other reason for the fire, the one that she kept to herself, was that she didn’t want him to come home to a collection of ghosts, to a haunted place and a haunted person. If she could spare him the grief of mourning himself, the pain of seeing his own final resting place, how could she not try to save him from it? His body is turning to embers before her and still she protects him. It’s instinctual, she supposes, after all these years.

She opens her eyes again. The fire is still so bright it hurts, but she can’t look away. She remembers stories from her childhood of ancient heroes and the fires they had all inevitably ended up in. He would have liked that. He had always wanted to be a hero.

She is cold, but she does not make any move to leave. She will see this through. It’s the least she can do. In some horrible way, she knows he would do the same for her.

She wishes the team would give her some time alone, as the fire slowly begins to die in the dawning light, but they stay there with her. She loves them for that. She looks up again as the stars one by one begin to fade from view. Soon she will be up there with them, searching for him. She tries not to think about the ashes in the fire. Energy never dies, anyways.


End file.
